Power transistors are commonly used in applications like: hybrid vehicles, electric vehicles, automotive, home appliances, LED lighting, TVs, power and energy. In the old days an engineering team could build their device with power transistors, then after production run some thermal testing to see if they guessed the proper… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Explaining HAPS-DX in an elevator
Every development team has been through this challenge: finding a tool that looks fantastic, then heading off to the manager one or two levels up who has enough signature authority for the purchase order. Signatures for amounts reading more than a couple of trailing zeros on POs are rarely free, or painless. … Read More
AMD Design IP Deal with Virage Logic… Oops… Synopsys
Whoever has said that history never repeats itself should read this recent PR from AMD! The news can be summarized in three points:
- Multi-year agreement gives AMD access to a range of Synopsys design IP including interface, memory compiler, logic library and analog IP for advanced FinFET process nodes
- Synopsys acquires rights
Samsung 14nm FinFET Design with Cadence Tools
The first consumer products with 20nm processing are arriving in 2014 like the 2 billion transistor A8 chip in the iPhone 6, however at the 14nm node there are new designs underway to continue the trend of Moore’s Law. To get a better feel for the challenges of designing with 14nm FinFET technology I watched a 23 minute video … Read More
Expansion at Calypto through Real Value Addition in SoC Design
When we get the notion of expansion of a company, it always provides a positive picture about something good happening to boost that expansion. There can be several reasons for expansion such as merger & acquisition, formation of joint venture or partnership, large customer orders and so on. However, organic expansion which… Read More
Is Number of Signoff Corners an Issue?
Semiconductor companies continue to use the traditional corner-based signoff approach that has been developed more than 40+ years ago and has since remained mainly unchanged as an industry paradigm. Initially it had 2 corners, namely Worst Case (WC) and Best Case (BC) with the maximum and minimum cell delay respectively. Note… Read More
TCAD to SPICE
Power devices have historically been made from silicon (Si), which has reached the limit of electric power loss reduction. With the superior physical and electrical properties of silicon carbide (SiC), we can expect to see a significant expansion in the amount of electric power conversion of electrical equipment as well as reduced… Read More
MEMS+, Bringing MEMS into the Electronic World
One of the things about MEMS devices is that they almost always live on a chip that also contains the electronics necessary to process the output from the sensor. For example, an on-chip accelerometer for a car airbag deployment will contain the electronics necessary to process the signal from the sensor and end up with something… Read More
Designing the Right Architecture Using HLS
With the advent of HLS tools, general notion which comes to mind is that okay, there’s an automated tool which can optimize your design description written in C++/SystemC and provide you a perfect RTL. In real life, it’s not so, any design description needs hardware designer’s expertise to adopt right algorithm and architecture… Read More
Optimize Your Interconnect & Design at System Level for Best Results
As the SoC design size, complexity and functionality keeps on increasing with multiple IPs packed together and design time and time-to-market keeps on decreasing amid critical constraints on PPA, there is no other alternative than to do the design first-time-right not to miss the window of opportunity. And that could be possible… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki